RICHARD VON STURMER was born on Auckland’s North Shore in 1957. He is a writer, performer, and film-maker. His written work has appeared in many anthologies and literary journals, including Landfall, Sport, brief, and the NZ Listener. Seven collections of his writing have been published: We Xerox Your Zebras (Modern House, 1988), A Network of Dissolving Threads (Auckland University Press, 1991), Suchness: Zen Poetry and Prose (HeadworX, 2005), On the Eve of Never Departing (Titus Books, 2009) Book of Equanimity Verses (Puriri Press, 2013), This Explains Everything (Atuanui Press, 2016) and Postcard Stories (Titus Books, 2019). His film work can be viewed at CIRCUIT, http://www.circuit.org.nz/ , a website featuring New Zealand film and video. In 2020 he was the writer in residence at Waikato University

He is also well-known as writing the lyrics for There is No Depression in New Zealand, which has become the country’s alternate national anthem. In the 1980s he and his partner, Amala Wrightson, toured New Zealand and Australia as the performing duo, The Humanimals.

He is currently working with filmmaker and musician Gabriel White as the Floral Clocks. They have recorded three albums: Desert Fire (2014), A Beautiful Shade of Blue (2017) and Gas Giant (2019). https://thefloralclocks.bandcamp.com/

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